ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an introduction to the research on populism and the studies on Euroscepticism and outlines the focus of this book and the main research questions. After introducing the topic of this book, the chapter turns to the theoretical framework and the discussion of the methods used in this study. It clarifies the rationale behind the selection and comparison of the cases and discusses the analytical categories that are central in this study and the stages of the analysis. The approach of this book is structured at three different levels: first, Critical Discourse Studies provides with a general approach to the relation between meaning-making activities and social relations as a tradition linking critical social theory (i.e., the analysis of power and the naturalization of social conventions and social orders) with discourse analysis; at a second level, Foucauldian notions of dispositif, context, and discourse serve to build the theoretical and methodological approach; third, corpus linguistics provides a set of techniques to explore textual manifestations of broader discourses. Finally, there is a conclusion with some general remarks concerning the literature on populism and Euroscepticism.
